Capturing Our Days

My name is Brigita Soldo and I am a 25-year-old girl from Croatia, currently residing in Belgium. How that came to happen is a long story I will try to keep short in this first post on Capturing Our Days.

It all started during my college years when I was studying art history but daydreaming of wandering through cobblestone streets of any city that was covered in those. I suppose the desire to travel is even bigger if you’ve never left your own country and you’ve spent your childhood and young adulthood reading and daydreaming about those foreign, yet somehow familiar places. I think you know what feeling I’m talking about. It almost felt as if I was destined to see them for myself one day as if doing that would make me happy in a uniquely different way. But coming from a big family, I put those dreams away until one day, I decided I needed a change of scenery.

An afternoon at Comptoir Florian Tea Room

La vie à Bruxelles

Rue de la Cigogne, Brussels

I decided to play it safe, by choosing to work as an au-pair in Brussels. This was in the summer of 2014 and it was supposed to last 10 months after which I wanted to either try the same thing out in another country or do something a bit more adventurous. I immediately fell in love with Brussels, a city that offered me cinemas that only play old movies, tea rooms that play only jazz music in their charming interiors, all the concerts of my favorite artists, the most beautiful architecture that was in fact an actual background to my everyday life, unlike a daydream it used to be before, and so much more. In the end, the most unexpected thing happened and not only did I fall in love with Belgium, I also fell in love with a Belgian. I say unexpected because I am extremely shy and awful when it comes to meeting new people – just ask my boyfriend!

Le Clos des Récollets, Durbuy

How this blog came to be has a lot to do with that person. In fact, it all started when he told me he had a dream about me having a blog, which I laughed off. Then came suggestions from friends who knew I love photography and writing, and I thought “well maybe, why not?”. I toyed around with the idea of it but you know how it is, things like that are so easy to postpone. Not long after that, my birthday came along and I got the most unexpected gift ever, this blog named after the hashtag I was using alongside our posts on Instagram.

“…cinemas that only play old movies, tea rooms that play only jazz music in their charming interiors and beautiful gothic architecture…”

The view from the Henri-Chapelle American Memorial, near Plombières

In the end, as scary as it might be to start a blog in the sea of blogs out there, I am mostly genuinely happy about having this opportunity to build something from scratch, something I could call my own. This is a big leap for me, deciding to share my thoughts and travels instead of keeping them hidden away in my notebooks. Yet more than anything else, I feel motivated and exhilarated to build this little creative outlet of mine. Feel free to follow me in capturing my wanders through forests and tiny villages in Wallonia, together with Flemish cities in Belgium and wider.